Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews
Read it on seangoedecke.com In the last two years, code review has gotten much more important. Code is now easy to generate using LLMs, but it’s still just...
Should LLMs just treat text content as an image?
Read it on seangoedecke.com Several days ago, DeepSeek released a new OCR paper. OCR, or “optical character recognition”, is the process of converting an...
What have we learned about building agentic AI tools?
Read it on seangoedecke.com In the middle of 2025, agentic coding finally became a thing: first with the release of Claude Sonnet 4, the first “smart enough...
We are in the "gentleman scientist" era of AI research
Read it on seangoedecke.com Many scientific discoveries used to be made by amateurs. William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, was a composer and an organist....
How I provide technical clarity to non-technical leaders
Read it on seangoedecke.com My mission as a staff engineer is to provide technical clarity to the organization. Of course, I do other stuff too. I run...
GPT-5-Codex is a better AI researcher than me
Read it on seangoedecke.com In What’s the strongest AI model you can train on a laptop in five minutes? I tried my hand at answering a silly AI-research...
How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer
Read it on seangoedecke.com Many software engineers are fatalistic about company politics. They believe that it’s pointless to get involved, because1:...
What is "good taste" in software engineering?
Read it on seangoedecke.com Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with...
AI coding agents rely too much on fallbacks
Read it on seangoedecke.com One frustrating pattern I’ve noticed in AI agents - at least in Claude Code, Codex and Copilot - is building automatic fallbacks....
Endless AI-generated Wikipedia
Read it on seangoedecke.com I built an infinite, AI-generated wiki. You can try it out at endlesswiki.com! Why build an AI-generated wiki? Large language...
What I learned building an AI-driven spaced repetition app
Read it on seangoedecke.com I spent the last couple of weeks building an AI-driven spaced repetition app. You can try it out here. Spaced repetition Like...
AI is good news for Australian and European software engineers
Read it on seangoedecke.com Right now the dominant programing model is something like “centaur chess”, where a skilled human is paired with a computer...
If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
Read it on seangoedecke.com Using AI agents correctly is a process of reviewing code. If you’re good at reviewing code, you’ll be good at using tools like...
The whole point of OpenAI's Responses API is to help them hide reasoning traces
Read it on seangoedecke.com About six months ago, OpenAI released their Responses API, which replaced their previous /chat/completions API for inference. The...
'Make invalid states representable' considered harmful
Read it on seangoedecke.com One of the most controversial things I believe about good software design is that your code should be more flexible than your...
An unofficial FAQ for Stripe's new "Tempo" blockchain
Read it on seangoedecke.com Stripe just announced Tempo, a “L1 blockchain” for “stablecoin payments”. What does any of this mean? In 2021, I was interested...
Seeing like a software company
Read it on seangoedecke.com The big idea of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State can be expressed in three points: Modern organizations exert control by...
Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
Read it on seangoedecke.com When designing software systems, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s surprising how far you can take this piece...
Finding the low-hanging fruit in tech companies
Read it on seangoedecke.com Suppose your job is to pick fruit in a giant orchard. The orchard covers several hills and valleys, and is big enough that you’d...
Everything I know about good API design
Read it on seangoedecke.com Most of what modern software engineers do1 involves APIs: public interfaces for communicating with a program, like this one from...
